Today we break ground

Hi all,

I'm new to blogging, but the prospect of starting a six month massive home renovation project was too tempting an opportunity to let pass without sharing all the gory details with, well, the entire world.

Today construction officially and formally started on our project. We are doing an addition that will include a first floor master bedroom and laundry room. This will involve taking over and enlarging our current garage space, so we will also be building a new detached garage in the back yard. And since we were spending THAT much money, hubby Jonathan decided we might as well go whole hog and build a mini-apartment (wait, we can't call it an apartment--more on that later), that is, guest quarters or study on top of the new garage.

What I hope to do with this blog is keep y'all updated on how it's going, as well as post photos of the progress, assuming I can figure out how to upload photos here.

Although this project has been in the works for several months, including designing and drawing up plans, obtaining bids, etc., I'm calling today the official First Day of Renovation, for the pure and simple reason that this is the day I wrote the check for $48,000 to our contractor, John Wagner.

That's not the total paid in advance, in case you're wondering. It's actually just the down payment. *gulp*

So the crew showed up at 9:00. The first step was to unload a case of water and a mini-refrigerator for the crew. This is potentially problematic because the porta-potty isn't due to be delivered until Friday, two days from now.

When I left them around 10:30 am they had already set up headquarters in the existing garage (which I had devoted the last two weekends to emptying out and cleaning completely--Not Fun) and made a good head start on tearing down the portion of our fence that will have to go to make room for the new garage.

In future posts I'll backtrack a bit and explain why we wanted the renovation, why we're doing it now, and give more detail on what the job will actually entail.